Stops vs. deaths

While the New York mayor’s race drags on, generating mostly ho-hums — or occasionally an “Oh Gawd” — Ray Kelly is campaigning all-out for “Stop-and-Frisk.”

Stop-and-Frisk has made powerful enemies. Depending on who’s elected the new mayor, or depending on what Eric Holder’s Justice Department decides to do, Stop-and-Frisk could be seeing its last days.

Stop-and-Frisk is nothing more than racial profiling, according to mostly left-leaning critics but also according to a few libertarians, though libertarians are a rare breed around government-loving Gotham.

Gothamites might go for, in substantial percentages, random searches of Wall Street traders or landlords. They might go for confiscating the weapons of NRA members. But stop and frisk people whose description matches that of a perpetrator in a nearby robbery? Encroach on these citizens’ Second as well as Fourth Amendment rights? Not so fast!

And the 8,000 firearms that Stop-and Frisk has taken off the streets? Well, it’s not as if they were taken off real menaces — you know, like people with right-to-carry permits, say, or collectors’ licenses.

Kelly, New York’s police commissioner, has been campaigning day and night to make the case that Stop-and-Frisk is really a “life-saving” program, not a program for harassing African American and Hispanic males as widely averred around NYU and Columbia and wherever else New York sophisticates convene.

Kelly contends, first off, that Stop-and-Frisk is something of a misnomer, especially as to the “frisk” part. The PD keeps careful data on this, and only half of the stops involve frisks, says Kelly. And only nine in a hundred stops involve actual searches, he adds.

As for the “stop” part, New York cops average one — one — a week each.

Yeah, but what about the race part? Kelly insists that the stops pretty much reflect the demographics of the precinct where the stops are made. Or reflect victims’ descriptions of suspects. This claim occasions a lot of eye-rolling among skeptics. What’s Kelly got to back this up? Anything besides just data?

Holder’s Justice Department lawyers, who are doing a review of the matter, may well be demanding to know why stops of African Americans aren’t capped at precisely 23.4 percent — reflecting their proportion of the city’s population.

Kelly’s answer is: “That’s like saying police should stop males no more than 50 percent of the time because they represent half of the population, when in fact they are responsible for about 90 percent of violent crime....” Holder may find that response a bit smart-alecky, and Holder’s not a guy you want to alienate. He can keep you tied up in depositions alone until the sun implodes and sucks everything into black hole.

Nor is Holder likely to be pleased with Kelly’s smart-alec argument that because murders have dropped by 7,346 since Stop-and-Frisk was launched, you can think of Stop-and-Frisk as a program that’s saved 7,346 lives.

In his typical smart-alec New Yorker way, Kelly can’t resist adding that those 7,346 fewer murders “saved — if history is a guide — the lives of young men of color.”

But it seems to be the critics’ rhetoric that’s catching on, not Kelly’s facts. After all, Holder is reviewing the cases of young black males who are being stopped and questioned in the streets of New York, not the cases of young black males who are being gunned down in record numbers in the streets of Chicago, President Obama’s hometown.